The influence of morphological structure information on the memorization of Chinese compound words

The present study investigated the influence of morphological structure information on the memorization of Chinese subordinate and coordinative compound words using the memory conjunction error paradigm. During the Study Phase, Hong Kong Chinese college students were asked to either judge the word class (Exp. 1, N = 25) or the orthographic structure (Exp. 2, N = 26) of a set of Chinese compound words (Old words). During the Test Phase, the participants were presented with half of the Old words that they had previously seen during the Study Phase and a set of New words, which shared or did not share morphemes with the Old words, and were asked to determine whether they had seen these words in the Study Phase. Half of the New words shared the same compounding structure with the Old words (either subordinate or coordinative) and the other half did not. The participants made more memory errors when both the Old words and the New words were coordinative compounds compared to situations in which the Old words and the New words were subordinate compounds or where the structures of the Old words and the New words were incongruent. The involvement of the processing of morphological structure information during word memorization was supported by the findings. The different characteristics of the two compounding structures were discussed and a morphological structure layer in the mental lexicon was proposed to interpret the results.